Maria (2024)
Directed by Pablo Larraín
“Maria” and Angelina, Two Divas in Pieces
The “false biopic” of Callas by Pablo Larraín in competition at Venice 81, the final chapter of the trilogy that already includes Jackie and Spencer, is the deconstruction of an icon. Actually, two: because Jolie (brilliant) is also at the center of this elegant character study.
by Mattia Carzaniga
Maria sees Onassis, at night, in her bed. But Onassis has been dead for a long time. She sees TV crews wanting to interview her, choirs singing opera arias under the Eiffel Tower. She sees her own projection, perhaps what is already her ghost. Or maybe, finally, she sees herself. Pablo Larraín also sees Maria, in the sense that it’s truly a vision, his vision. Like Jackie, like Diana. But Maria, the final chapter in competition at Venice 81 of this trilogy on three female icons of the 20th century, is even more radically a deconstruction, a demystification, almost a mockery of the most overused genre ever, certainly of recent years: the biopic.
Everything about Maria Callas is there, in every sense, even literally. There’s all the “vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” between stage and reality, the gossip, the thinness, the pills, the Fernet-Branca. It’s all there right from the first montage: the great successes, the photos on the boat with the Greek billionaire, the stage costumes burned when, perhaps, she decides it’s time for the final curtain. As if to say: let’s exhaust everything anyone has ever said or continues to say about her and her iconography (among the latest, Monica Bellucci and Marina Abramović) and try to do something else.
Specifically: a character study not so much about a woman but about art, which becomes the true public and private character, the demon from which it’s impossible to separate. In opera, reason doesn’t exist, says Maria in Steven Knight’s beautiful script (the same as Spencer; Jackie was written by Noah Oppenheim). And there are few reasons in this film either, which mixes bodies and ghosts, melodrama and irony (the interview, already the narrative structure of Jackie, is the flow of self-consciousness of a drugged-up mind), the usual formal elegance (cinematography by the great Ed Lachman), and kitsch (but isn’t opera defined by it?), real estate porn, and various fetishes—the apartment-museum where she lives was above the Mastroianni’s, as we discovered in the delightful Marcello mio when mother Catherine Deneuve and daughter Chiara Mastroianni visit their old home; Maria’s voice rose from the fireplace, they say, making our brains explode.
And Maria is naturally a character study not of one, but of two divas. Callas and Jolie. Angelina is too Angelina, Clint Eastwood once said (more or less) when he directed her in Changeling, a great film where she was very good and for which she received an Oscar nomination. It wasn’t a criticism: he meant that a face like that, a character (public and private) like that, is always very present, too present. You can’t separate it from the role. Angelina remains Angelina in this film. She disguises herself little. Her nose is just slightly humped, her accent only a little roughened. She’s a diva equal to the one she portrays, so she can afford not to mimic her.
And yet, Angelina disappears in this kind of mirror she falls into, like in Wonderland. Angelina studied singing for months; the voice heard in the film is Callas’s original but also, at least a little, hers. But there’s no Method acting here, rather almost a demand for subtraction. This deconstruction of stardom seems to include a dismantling of her own public figure, or at least of how the woman, the actress, the mother, the activist, the director is perceived.
The formidable Chilean director has created with these three films a kind of Larraín Cinematic Universe. At one point, due to Onassis, Jackie Kennedy is mentioned, and you wonder if Natalie Portman will appear. She doesn’t, but other suggestions, other references from one text to another remain. The master/servant dynamic, for example, already present in the previous El Conde, at Venice last year, another false biopic that played with a genre (vampire horror) to dismantle it, almost to the point of sabotaging it. Here, we have the butler played by Pierfrancesco Favino and the housekeeper played by Alba Rohrwacher, both perfect and very good, playing the role of Maria’s audience, always complacent but also tenderly helpless in front of this divine, this superhuman/too human woman.
“There’s a theater in my head,” Maria says repeatedly, and this film is a stage too, from the first to the last scene, where the curtains open and close to show, as the hapless doctor whom Callas constantly shuts out says, that it’s all a matter of life and death, but in the theater, life and death always coexist, they are fake, they are very real.
Rolling Stone Italia, August 30, 2024
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Angelina Jolie takes on the role of a lifetime, portraying Maria Callas in her final days. In Maria, Pablo Larraín once again delivers an unconventional biopic, offering a counterpart to his earlier Jackie, as he pays tribute to the “Divine” Callas. The film is in competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival.
by Valerio Sammarco
“We are lucky; we can go anywhere in the world without issue. But we can never escape anywhere.”
This powerful exchange between Maria Callas and U.S. President John F. Kennedy is one of the striking moments in this film, which revisits episodes from Callas’ life. Just moments before, Marilyn Monroe had sung for JFK’s birthday (“No one cares about her voice, just like no one cares about your body,” Onassis tells Callas as they listen…), with Jackie, the president’s wife, nowhere to be seen. Ironically, Jackie would later marry Aristoteles Onassis in 1968, the same man who had been Callas’ companion since 1959.
In Maria, Larraín mirrors Jackie (where JFK never appeared), presenting another unconventional biopic focused on a female icon’s more private side. This marks the Chilean director’s sixth competition entry at the Venice Film Festival (he won Best Screenplay in 2023 for El Conde). Like his other film, Spencer, about Lady Diana, Maria centers on the lesser-known aspects of a famous woman.
Set in 1977, Maria opens with Callas’ death on September 16, in her Paris apartment. The film will return to that moment at the end, but first, it follows the final days of the great soprano. Isolated from the outside world, she is cared for by her loyal servants, Ferruccio and Bruna (played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher). Ferruccio moves the piano daily according to Callas’ mood, while Bruna, in addition to cooking and keeping the house in order, is tasked with judging Callas’ vocal performances—though her voice is no longer what it once was. Callas (Angelina Jolie in perhaps her most significant role) hasn’t eaten for days, numbs herself with Mandrax (a powerful antidepressant), and hasn’t performed in years, yet refuses to accept that she can no longer sing.
This is where the cinematic and illusory device, created by Steven Knight (screenplay) and Larraín, comes into play. To celebrate her extraordinary voice and tumultuous life, the film takes Callas through the streets of 1970s Paris. Edward Lachman’s cinematography beautifully captures the light of those late summer days approaching autumn. The narrative constantly shifts between an imagined reality and a hallucinatory present, in continuous dialogue with the pivotal moments of her life—her private struggles (from her childhood, where her mother forced her to sing for money, to her tumultuous relationship with Onassis, played by Haluk Bilginer) and her monumental performances worldwide.
“At times, moments from my life flash before me,” Maria says at one point. Occasionally, we also see her being interviewed by a young filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose name, fittingly, is Mandrax. He’s determined to film her in her last days, another narrative device in which the diva attempts to tell her story to the world. This, too, connects the film back to Jackie.
The slow march toward death is juxtaposed with a return to life, as the film seeks to capture the essence of the woman the world had called “Divine.” The film is enriched by its musical repertoire, with a brilliant editing style that juxtaposes her final attempts at singing with her performances from her golden years. Larraín’s work is also a profound reflection on the passage of time and its perception, shaped by the events that define us. It’s no coincidence that in the first and last scenes, Callas’ body lies partially hidden on the floor. In these moments, it’s as though we are looking at a painting: that day, the director suggests, time stood still not only for Callas but for Ferruccio and Bruna, the last two people who truly cared for her.
Cinematografo, August 29, 2024
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Presented in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Maria completes Pablo Larraín’s trilogy focused on three iconic women who profoundly shaped 20th-century culture. After portraying Jacqueline Kennedy (Jackie) and Lady Diana (Spencer), Larraín now turns his attention to the legendary Maria Callas. These three films depict three female portraits, three forms of imprisonment, and confirm Larraín’s gaze on History and Power, as we await the liberating flames of Valparaíso.
by Enrico Azzano
Μαρία Άννα Καικιλία Σοφία Καλογεροπούλου
Set in Paris, 1977, four years after her retirement, Maria Callas welcomes a journalist to reflect on her tumultuous, tragic, and beautiful life. The film portrays the final days of the greatest opera singer in the world, filled with memories, regrets, and ghosts.
Vivi ancora, io son la vita
Nei miei occhi è il tuo cielo
Tu non sei sola
Le lacrime tue io le raccolgo
Io sto sul mio cammino e ti sorreggo
Sorridi e spera, io son l’amore…
– Maria Callas, La mamma morta
Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Pablo Larraín is also constructing, piece by piece, his own world of heroes and heroines, complete with their villains. Rather than focusing on origin stories or team-ups (though fans may long for a crossover), Larraín zooms in on brief but intense and tragic periods in these lives—marked by death and the end of everything, not only life but dreams and illusions. Maria, the latest entry in the “Larraín Cinematic Universe,” mirrors Jackie, evoking its close-ups (here, one is long and blinding, reminding us of Angelina Jolie’s underused talent), narrative choices, golden prisons, and the solitude of these divine figures. Imperfect, divisive, heart-wrenching, and crystal-clear in its deliberate reinterpretation of 20th-century icons—horrors included.
Maria is musical and somewhat like a musical, suspended between a highly fictionalized reality and increasingly overpowering dreamlike visions. It’s a biopic that appears free, yet it’s anchored in narrative, aesthetic, and thematic choices aimed at creating not just a trilogy but a unified body of work, a theory, an overlap, and a declaration of intent. The recurring themes and formal elements in Jackie, Spencer, and Maria confirm a broader, historically and politically motivated project, present from the start in Larraín’s films: exploring dictatorship, 20th-century women, and men. And once again, the recurring theme is the dichotomy between imprisonment and freedom.
Icons, portraits, bodies. The face and body of Maria Callas, the “Divine,” tell different stories: on one side, the almost supernatural fusion of talent and elegance, captured in close-up; on the other, a gradual surrender to suffering, pain, and memories. Her body becomes weaker, overcome by art, love, and power.
While the idea of an imaginary journalist is intriguing and perfectly fits the narrative structure, Maria seems to lack the final step, or perhaps something more. It’s as if it’s a missed opportunity to become the Millennium Actress of opera—a bit too tied to the overarching form of the trilogy. What’s missing is the visionary whirlwind that elevated Neruda, and naturally, the extraordinarily layered coherence of Satoshi Kon’s masterpiece Millennium Actress, that fertile blend of art, life, and History.
In navigating this fragmented narrative and programmatic deconstruction, Larraín fills the gaps with meaning, not just in visions and flashbacks but also in off-screen moments. A prime example is the missed meeting between Maria and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a reference to the dissolved and deceptive fairy tale of Camelot, completed by the encounter with JFK—one of the most enjoyable villains in the “Larraín Cinematic Universe.” Upon closer inspection, behind every iconic woman of the 20th century stands a powerful man: Onassis, JFK, and Charles III—different but related manifestations of male power and authority.
Thankfully far from the idea of faithfully replicating reality or creating chronicle-style biopics, Larraín offers individual and collective interpretations. He deconstructs and reinterprets, taking risks and hinting at larger ideas, making full use of cinema’s potential. As with Jackie and Spencer, but also in the excellent Neruda, Larraín’s biopic is not a notebook of dates and events but a canvas, an abstract portrait, a tribute to the immortality of a symbol, its art, and cinema itself. Thus, Angelina Jolie is (and is not) Maria Callas.
Quinlan, September 1, 2024
